The Airbnb Squatter Has Been Officially Kicked Out Of That Palm Springs Condo

Julie Bort, provided by

Published 11:44 am, Friday, August 22, 2014

Cory Tschogl's months-long ordeal with a man and his brother who rented her Palm Springs condo via Airbnb and then refused to leave is officially over.

As of Thursday, Maksym Pashanin and Denys Pashanin have been legally evicted from the apartment, Tschogl told Business Insider. We have been covering her ordeal since it first began in mid-July. In an email to us, she wrote:

I just legally reclaimed my condo down in Palm Springs, and I'm happy to report that the press's involvement helped smoke out those Airbnb squatters much sooner than expected!! A great Success!! Thanks a bunch.

Airbnb is a wildly popular way for thrifty travelers to find accommodations worldwide. It lets people rent spare rooms or homes to strangers over the internet. Beside the many great experiences among Airbnb's 15 million guests, there are times when things go wrong.

In this case, the Pashanin brothers rented a condo from Tschogl for 44 days, paying for only 30 and then refusing to leave or pay the rest of what they owed when the time came for them to vacate.

Thanks to a quirk in California law, when a someone rents a place for 30 days or longer, they can be sometimes be considered a tenant, and a homeowner must go through the full eviction process to get them out. That can sometimes take months and cost thousands of dollars.

When Tschogl first tried to get Pashanin to leave by telling him she was shutting off the utilities, he threatened to sue her. (Read the threatening texts here.)

Maksym Pashanin publicly acknowledged he was squatting and that he would squat again in a message on Kickstarter. He and his brother ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $40,000 in 2013 — a video game — but so far have yet to deliver on the product.

When angry Kickstarter backers starting writing in about the lack of progress on the video game and the squatting, Maksym Pashanin glibly replied: "Ok guys, what's the latest deets on the drama? 10/10, would squat again."

Pashanin was found, however, to have run-ins with other California landlords with apartments rented through methods other than Airbnb. In 2009, the San Francisco courts evicted he and his brother from a San Francisco apartment after they stopped paying rent, court documents show. And in 2012, Maksym Pashanin sued his landlord for $10,000 over noise from "ongoing construction" in the backyard. The judge dismissed the case, and Pashanin moved out.